Posted
by
timothy
on Friday July 13, 2012 @06:52PM
from the big-slingshot dept.

Jack Spine writes "The Raspberry Pi is likely to be blasted into space, according to project founder Eben Upton. The $35/$25 credit-card-sized single-board educational computer could be used in sounding rockets, satellites, and high altitude balloon tests, according to Upton. Raspberry Pi has proved wildly popular since its launch, with one developer planning to build into a model boat to sail it across the Atlantic."

While I quickly recognized that "Pi" sounds like "Pie", the only association I have with that is something to eat. I still can't see the connection to porn.However I wonder if Raspberry Pi are squared.:-)

Because everyone does it these days. Every other university has a student "space exploration interest club" who launch a helium balloon to "near" space, snap a picture and recover their "satellite". Google launched 7 such balloons with a bunch of Android phones onboard to prove that "Android works in space", and the iPad pouch creators launched one to show how their pouch/case protects your iPad in the event of it accidentally falling from space. A couple of years ago it was "it can run your toaster", no

Registration for the Raspberry Pi has now closed. We are currently ensuring that the large number of customers who registered their interest over the final few days of registration have sufficient opportunity to order their Pi, and will be opening to general Raspberry Pi orders mid July.

If you signed up at the launch, you'd have one by now, and if not, you can get one quite soon.

Part of the issue is the frequency of the posted Raspberry Pi stories that annoys others, let alone myself. The other is that, while it's a nice, little piece of equipment, it's nothing special: anyone that has gone through a decent electrical/computer engineering program should be more than capable of laying out a similar PCB, within the span of a month or two; after that point, ordering the parts and having them mounted is trivial.

Well, why don't you go ahead and make one then, and then try hand-soldering those tiny SoC connectors.

Anyone who has spent a modicum of time doing PCB design would know that many, if not most, PCB manufacturers will either install surface mount components or have the board shipped off to a partnering assembly company for an incredibly small fee (anywhere from $15 USD to $0.04 USD per 2-sided board, depending on the run size/number of unique parts). Why you would suggest hand-soldering components is beyond me.

Touching on your other point, nothing in my original post should suggest that I want to spend ti

Also, as an aside, there are plenty of "better" development boards available than the Raspberry Pi. Take, for example, the ODROID-X (http://www.hardkernel.com/renewal_2011/products/prdt_info.php?g_code=G133999328931), which comes with a 1.4 GHz quad-core ARM Cortex-A9, a quad-core ARM Mali-400 GPU, 1 GB of LP-DDR2 RAM, and much more, all for $129 USD.

Yeah, but I only spent $35. Tell me how to convince my wife it's worth spending another hundred bucks for a tiny computer I can play around with... Not going to happen. But for $35, she doesn't care. My order is actually shipping right now. The point was to create something nearly anyone could afford and toy with. They did it, hence the interest.

The problem is you can't buy it and most of these articles are empty pointless slashvertisements. I swear, if someone stuck one up their ass, you'd have an article on/. In an hour talking about colonoscopy applications for the Rasperry Pi.

Are you basing that on some actual data, or just the whining of people on Slashdot? I know someone who had his third delivered a couple of weeks ago, and he didn't order it until after his first had arrived, so the delays can't be that huge...

Yes, you can buy them if you were incredibly lucky. Myself? I've been stuck on a waiting list for a couple of months now.

This is the problem with F/OSS hardware projects, you can either take the gamble and pre-order way in advance in hopes of avoiding the delay but take the risk that the project will never materialize at all or may completely change its goals, or you wait and it takes 3-4 months before you get your product, and by that time, something else will have come out.

The problem with the PI and nearly every other promising F/OSS device that wants to be cheap is that you can't buy it. All of their "official distributors" say they're out of stock and the next shipment will happen "very soon". I wouldn't mind more Raspberry Pi articles if you could actually buy it and use it, but you can't. By the time the next available shipment arrives and those that have pre-ordered it receive their Pi, there will be something better.

I have been playing with my Raspberry Pi for a little while now, mostly as a media center and like the way the CEC package works with CEC compatible TV, turns on the TV and you use the TV remote. With all the developing going on, I suspect that before too long I will be able to put together a Raspberry Pi with an ipcam viewer app that can turn on the TV when a proximity switch is activated. I already have an Adroid app for ip cameras that also support TPZ , which could be rewired along with a inexpensive

It is ridiculous to say you could use this for a satellite. Yes, you could throw this up into orbit in a satellite and it would probably work for a little while before radiation issues. If you are buying a multimillion dollar rocket, you can afford to throw down more than $35 for your satellite bus. If you are hitching a free ride on rocket bought by a third-party and just wanted a few day of LEO orbit, then yes Raspberry Pi could be an option. If you have a free ride to space, you might want to spend a

The exceptional point about the Raspberry Pi is that you can get undergraduates to program it well within the timescale of a degree. That team from Leicester University that is mentioned in the article? I'm part of it:

http://edgepenguin.com/content/raspberry.html

One of the issues we had in a previous (abandoned) cubesat project was the difficulty in programming a microcontroller.

Having been part of an attempt to construct a cubesat, I can confidently assert that you are talking BS. Costs for cubesats

Wrong guess about the board, and wrong about everything else too. No wonder you are posting as AC. We have investigated the use of phones for this application before (because we are not stupid) but found several problems.

I'm not going to get into this because you seem like a troll, and it probably isn't worth my time engaging with someone using anonymity to snarl at someone across the Internet. Bye.

You probably can't use directly a Raspberry-Pi board in space application (radiation is not the only problem, you also have thermal issues,...), but using not specificaly space-hardened processors could be possible in a majority/median voter system. But you need to remplace one space hardened processor with a bunch of normal processors, and have a specific electronic for the voter system. And put a shield to lower the radiations.

It isn't that hard to design a system that is passively thermal managed, for a realistic range of spin rates.

The mounting points is a serious stumbling block; certainly moreso than radiation or temperature. Launch vehicles that don't have squishy human payloads aren't shy about peaking at 15Gs (SD cards can and should be glued in place. We already investigated this.) I never did mechanical design - but unless I hear otherwise I wouldn't consider it a fatal problem. If thermal and mounting do become really p

Do you have result of tests or calculations somewhere ? I'm interrested in such stuff even if it's not close to my job anymore. I've seen a lot of stuff about space designed components but no test or calculations "regular" COTS. (just for reference, for spacecraft on a ~50 inclined orbit arround 1000km altitude, we got (in prediction and in real life) around 70 EDAC a day (with maybe 90% in the SAA, I may be able to find a plot of this) in a 4Mo memory. (the calculated double error rate, taking in account t

Don't have them to hand, but we were modelling a much lower orbit (few hundred kms) which makes a big difference for radiation. We look at COTS survivability for a year, at 45 degree inclination, and found it good enough for student work:)

... of components due to lack of air (and gravity!) for convection cooling. I think that these are not the same things (although they are related) the sunlit side of the satellite could be a toasty 100 degrees C, while the dark side could be -100. If the satellite is spinning but not fast enough perhaps some traces could expand and contract enough to break. Meanwhile without air to conduct heat, a single small component on the board could overheat and fail.

Radiation in LEO isn't that bad. COTS components don't just die the moment they leave the atmosphere. If every single event upset translated into an actual fault, they wouldn't be very reliable down here on earth either.

Cubesats have flown with COTS hardware - and they have done it through orbits that pass through the south atlantic anomaly. Yes, there are reliability issues - but certainly not showstoppers.

Maybe when I can order one and have it at my house in less than 6 months, then I'll give a fuck about what you can do with them. This may as well be one of the million other vaporware products that were always impossible to get.

I wonder how they plan to hold it down, given that the Pi board's lack of mounting holes is something of an annoying fail.
There's not even much space on the edge of the board to clamp it, which seems to have created an interesting challenge to those now making Pi-cases. Although in this application, I assume most of the connectors would be removed, giving a bit more spare board-area.

I bought a logic analyser (open source hw+sw) for $50 and while it was very cheap, the developers also forgot to include mounting holes!

what is it with very smart people who forget obvious stuff like this? uh, did you even think that anyone would care to have standoffs and screws and a case? no? really?? duct tape for the lot of us? that how it goes?

sigh. pcb design has a lot of details (I do it, part time, myself) but please folks, don't forget obvious things like HOW TO MOUNT the damned board. also